Another manga that plays better than the anime (at least at the
beginning?) Who’d have figured?

I watched the first episode of MONSTER’s TV adaptation over a year ago
and enjoyed it well enough, but the show just didn’t have the same sort of gripping urgency that Urasawa puts
into every page and panel of this book. Above all the other merits to be examined here,
it’s the artist’s visual storytelling that makes MONSTER so compelling. His
choices of layouts, angles, films and selective rendering would infuse a Sunday
tea party with earth-shaking strum und drang. Which is to say that this book’s one of those rare
comics where you’re hooked by the simple telling of it.

Strum und drang - - the German term’s fitting in a number of ways.
MONSTER tells the story of Dr. Kenzo Tenma, a Japanese ex-pat surgeon working
in an impressively researched-and-rendered Dusseldorf hospital. After only a
few pages of lead-in, the story plunges the good man into intense moral
quandaries that’d give Nietzche plenty to ponder. See, he’s engaged to the
daughter of the hospital’s director and is on track for an assuredly-ceaseless
series of promotions - - provided he quietly obey his callous, profit-minded
future father-in-law. However, when a lowly Turkish patient dies in surgery
after Tenma’s instructed to ignore him, his moral indignation swells. And when triage time comes again, he defiantly
chooses to operate on a critically-injured little boy instead of the important
politician he’s been ordered to care for first.

As in all good noirs, this one principled act sets Tenma’s life onto a
terrible spiral. His boss demotes him and his fiancé dumps him, in short order.
Then, even after his professional life rebounds, he makes a horrifying
discovery - - the young boy he saved eventually grew up into a serial killer! Worse yet, this “monster” feels protective of the doctor, and he’ll murder
those who’ve wronged him - - those whose deaths Tenma's wished for in private
- - in a grotesque effort to “pay it forward.”

Whether Tenma was responsible
for the Turkish patient’s death or not quickly proves to be the least of the
complicated moral quandaries he has to work through.

Common morbid themes aside, MONSTER’s opener works sharply enough to
remind me of DEATH NOTE’s first volume. It gets to one nail-biter of a hook
before the last page, and it doesn’t waste a single moment before getting into the
sort of meaty conflict that hits on a level one can relate to enough that it actually gets uncomfortable.
There’s no lollygagging set-up before “we get to the good stuff” several installments
down the line. The incident where Tenma has to face the consequences of the Turk’s
death opens the story with the strongest kind of drama - - the sort where even
the most seemingly virtuous choice will weigh heavily on the hero’s shoulders.

Without any demonic shinigami or magical death notes, Tenma’s pushed into having the effectively same power to pick who lives and who dies that the nearly-omnipotent Light Yagami has in DEATH NOTE.
Both books point an unnerving finger at the reader and ask, “What
would you do?” Ostensibly, most stories sets out to ask that, but when these do it, it's far harder to shake off. They cut deep.

Yet there’s still something dampening the power of MONSTER's narrative - -a detail that’s usually invisible to most readers. See, reading this truly makes
me wish that more manga were lettered by computer, or that translators had bolder license to digitally remove word
balloons. Several scenes of powerful, understated storytelling wind
up stuttering at key moments due to obvious discrepancy in the language.

Maybe
more Japanese characters were needed to get a particular sentiment across to
the reader? Maybe the emptied balloons had to then be filled up by some
sort of English dialog? Whatever the cause, streaks of decent, translated dialog are often
punctuated by awkward, on-the-nose statements that spell out what the images
have already made abundantly clear to the reader.

You know, like when Dr.
Tenma’s fiancé drives up to him, slips off her engagement ring and coldly drops
it to the pavement. An utterance of “Your wedding ring!” from Tenma isn’t exactly
necessary then to get the message across, is it? Parts like that - - which
unavoidably draw you out of this otherwise enthralling narrative - - demonstrate how awkward a translation can get due to purism.

That said, such lettering issues don't derail MONSTER as a superb medical thriller - - and that's coming from somebody who's never had much patience for Robin Cook novels or Michael Crichton's non-sci-fi books. Once again, praising a popular older title for Retro Review feels like
showing up real late to a party. The kudos I’ve offered up here is surely just reiterating the kudos that's been already been given many, many times. All the same, there's still no harm in reaffirming the power of such a comic.